Villarreal leaped down and scurried into the tunnel. Evans dove like he was sliding into second base as a beam of light struck the dirt behind him. Bullets impacted the soft earth mere inches from his feet.
Thump-thump-thump.
“Hurry!” he shouted and shoved Villarreal’s heels.
Evans kicked and clawed for anything resembling traction. Banged his head and elbows repeatedly. Spilled out through the opening and splashed into the water.
A beam of light burst from the tunnel behind him, followed by a barrage of bullets that sizzled from the surface and ricocheted from the face of one of the feathered serpent statues.
Anya screamed and dove out of the way.
Evans coughed out a lungful of the wretched water and slogged away from the tunnel before another fusillade screamed through the chamber. He hurriedly donned the diving mask once more and switched on the light.
Took Jade by the hand and pulled her to him.
“The entrance to the maze is about three feet down and five feet that way. Right under that head there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s nowhere else to go. We’re sitting ducks here!”
“We can block the entrance—”
“Would you just listen to me for once!”
An oblong aura of light focused on the ruined face of the feathered serpent god, growing brighter by the second.
“Take the biggest breath you can hold and go!”
Jade looked past him and her eyes widened. She whirled and dove in one motion. Kicked off against his shins. He had to hope she was a good swimmer because that tunnel had to be at least twenty feet long.
The lens of a flashlight appeared from the corner of his eye. They were out of time.
Anya vanished beneath the water a split second before the beam settled upon her ripples.
“Go!” Evans shouted, but Villarreal was already gone. His kicking feet broke the surface mere seconds before Evans dove where they’d been.
Between the four of them, they’d churned up so much sediment that he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to find the tunnel until his shoulder grazed the side and he realized he was already inside. He swam for everything he was worth and ran into Villarreal from behind before he even saw him. They propelled themselves out the opposite end and straight toward the surface. Breached and gasped for air in the eight inches between the surface of the water and the ceiling of the cavern.
“It won’t take them long to figure out where we’ve gone,” Jade said.
“Our only advantage is that we’ve explored the maze before.”
“Twenty-five percent of it.”
“You can stay here if you’d rather.”
“You have the only light,” Anya said. “We’ll follow you.”
“On my count.”
“Just go!” Jade said.
Evans finally had the chance to dial on the flow of air as he dove back into the cloudy water. His light flashed across the hideous sculptures of Mictlantecuhtli and Mictlancihuatl, the god and goddess of the dead, and followed the outstretched forelimb of dog-faced Xolotl toward the mouth of the maze. Rounded the stone wall and swam until he reached the first fork before making a beeline for the surface. The others emerged seconds later, panting in the cool, stale air.
“We need to find—” Villarreal started, but the sloshing water rose over his mouth and cut him off. “We need to find someplace to hide.”
“We have to distance ourselves from them first,” Evans said.
“We do not even know for sure that they are following us. Surely they will leave once they have what they have come here to find.”
“Do you want to wait here long enough to find out for sure?” Jade asked.
“So which way do we go?”
“Left,” Anya said. “Then right. That’s as far as I know for sure.”
“Keep going straight after that until you hit the wall,” Evans said. “We’ll regroup there.”
“We should stay above the water,” Villarreal said.
“That will make too much noise and lead them straight to us.”
“What about the booby traps?”
“That’s where the flooding works in our favor.”
“Almost like it was planned that way,” Anya said.
“Just don’t touch the floor or any of the walls and we should be fine.”
“Should?” Villarreal said.
“You expect us to tread water indefinitely?” Jade said.
“Let me know if you come up with a better plan,” Evans said.
“We’re wasting time,” Anya said.
“If you encounter resistance of any kind, stop right where you are. Don’t try to push through anything that doesn’t belong there.”
“Like what?” Jade asked.
“Like a rope that could be supporting a counterweight or any sort of mechanism. Anything that gives or moves when you touch it.”
“How are we supposed to avoid them if we can’t see anything?”
“Stay right behind me and try not to stray from my path.”
“And what if something happens to you?”
Evans stared at her for several moments. Something in her voice caught him by surprise. She was one of the toughest and most confident people that he’d ever met. The idea of being completely reliant upon someone else terrified her.
“Just stay close,” he said, and dove once more.
He swam until his headlamp focused on the mortared stones of the wall. Veered left. Dodged the skeleton staked to the ground. Kicked toward the far wall. Breached and waited for the others.
Any second now whoever was out there would discover the tunnel leading to the maze.
They were running out of time.
Jade came up first and sputtered a mouthful of water.
“I don’t know how much longer I can tread.”
“You can and you will tread for as long as you have to.”
Villarreal splashed to the surface several feet away and swam toward them. He nearly smacked Anya in the head when she rose.
“Which way now?” he asked.
“Right,” Evans said. “Then another immediate right. If we keep going straight we’ll eventually run into a dead end.”
“And after that?”
“Right. No, left.”
“Are you sure?” Anya asked.
“We’ll find out, won’t we?”
A splashing sound echoed from the distance, followed by the sound of heavy breathing.
Anya clapped her hands over her mouth to stifle a startled cry.
Evans pressed his index finger to his regulator. He prayed the others understood and remained silent. He closed his eyes and strained to hear. There were at least two people behind them, he was certain, but couldn’t tell if there were more of them or not. He had to assume there were at least three and hope for the best.
“Are you ready?” he whispered.
He looked at each of them in turn, nodded to himself, and switched off his headlamp.
The resultant darkness was complete.
31
BARNETT
FOB Atlantis
“They last checked in at the south gate more than two hours ago,” Special Agent Avila said.
“The exhaust ducts?”
“Yes, sir.” Avila had to jog to keep up with Barnett as he strode through the base. The emergency lights cast a red pall over the entire station, including the men and women rushing to assume their positions. “Donovan responded to Sokolov’s call for support.”
“Why wasn’t I informed?”
“The call was routed to both you and Agent Morgan before it even reached Donovan. He was next in the chain of command.”
The events leading up to this catastrophe didn’t matter now. There would be plenty of time for analysis down the road. Right now he needed to assume authority over the situation before it spiraled out of his control. With Berkeley and Jonas confirmed dead and Donovan and Sokol
ov missing, presumed dead themselves, there was no way in hell he was going to be able to keep a lid on this. He should have activated Protocol Delta and initiated a lockdown when they first found Jonas’s remains. He’d made a command decision based on the information available to him at the time and it had returned to bite him in the ass.
“Would someone kill that infernal siren?” he shouted.
He was passing through the corridor to the command center when the racket finally ceased. As per protocol, the majority of the power had been shunted to storage, and what little still flowed diverted to critical functions in an effort to conserve enough to last for several months. Which meant they were going to have to deal with the emergency lights for the foreseeable future.
Agent Love was behind Barnett’s desk when he entered the command center.
“Tell me you have eyes,” he said.
She toggled some keys on his computer and stepped back so he could take his seat.
“We’ve got a drone sweeping the area around the ICMS, but with the storm—”
“Give me a visual.”
She reached across him and brought up the live-feed window. He maximized it and leaned closer. Everything was white, from the ground to the air to the frost forming on the edges of the lens. A gray crescent appeared in the corner of the screen, where a jagged ridge cut through the windswept accumulation.
“What was the nature of the emergency?” he asked.
“Sokolov called in a possible finding related to Subject Alpha,” Avila said.
“And you didn’t think that was worth interrupting whatever I was doing at the time?”
“We get several reports every day. Should we drag you out into the tunnels every time someone finds a scrap of fabric or something that ‘kind of looks like a footprint’?”
Barnett ignored her and focused on the monitor.
“Walk me through it. From the start.”
“Best we can tell, Agent Donovan met Agent Sokolov inside Exhaust Port C and proceeded to follow him to a point or points unknown.”
“There are no cameras past the south gate, correct?”
“No, sir. We reappropriated them when we installed the airlocks.”
“So it would have taken them half an hour to reach the exhaust ports. They would have stepped outside and wouldn’t have been able to see much more than we can through the storm.”
“Reported visibility is fifteen feet.”
“Take the drone down. I want to see what they would have seen from the ground.”
Love used a joystick to bring the drone closer to the ground, which tilted wildly as the propellers fought against the tempestuous wind.
“Sokolov would have basically had to trip over whatever he found. Take me back to the exhaust port.”
The drone rose and headed due north, toward where the sheer black granite of the Drygalski Mountains appeared from the storm, far closer than he expected. The drone streaked through the mouth of the exhaust port and hovered beside the open grate, momentarily shielded from the blowing snow.
“The IMCS is due south from there, correct?”
“Approximately.”
“And the wind’s blowing which direction?”
“East, sir, at forty miles per hour.”
“It would have driven them off course if they lost sight of the antenna. Alter your course ten degrees and follow that ridgeline down there.” He tapped the screen. “And take me down to ten feet.”
“We risk crashing at that altitude with the way the wind—” Love started.
“Then zoom in, for Christ’s sake.”
The snow drifted from the top of the rugged ridge, sparing the loose talus along the western slope. If Barnett were out there on foot, that’s exactly the route he would have chosen to shield himself from the brunt of the elements.
“What’s out there?” he asked.
“As far as we know,” Avila said, “there are no natural formations of any kind.”
“How about manmade? A power box. A shed. A vehicle. Anything.”
“The ICMS is the only piece of equipment in that valley and we have someone out there twice a day to service it. If there was anything, we would have found it by now.”
“We obviously didn’t, though, did we?”
She bristled at his words. Her lips writhed, but she held her tongue.
“What’s that right there?” Barnett tapped the edge of the screen, where he thought for a second he’d seen something stand apart from the snow. “No. Right there. Now, zoom in.”
The image tightened on the ground at the edge of the loose rock. The wind blew sideways across the accumulation, bringing with it new snowflakes and whipping up the accumulation. There was an irregular shape that at first looked like a shadow until he detected the faint pinkish hue.
“It must have followed them outside,” he whispered, and then louder: “Are the airlocks sealed?”
“We sealed them on both sides of the mountain the moment we sent the drone through,” Love said.
“I want every vent not physically contained within this complex sealed. Every shaft. Every tunnel.”
“All of our fail-safes are activated.”
“But if it got back inside first . . .”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence, nor did he need to point out the crevice between the rocks uphill from the bloodstained snow.
Love piloted the drone into position and hovered right over it. It was going to be a tight fit, if she was able to squeeze it through there at all. She maneuvered the drone diagonally and then straight down between walls rimed with ice. The image darkened and she switched on the drone’s light. The focus blurred until the aperture adjusted and revealed the animal carcasses littering the ground. Barnett took it all in at once. The pelts in the corner, the condition of the animal remains, the fecal material. He knew exactly what it was.
Hollis Richards had passed through their net before they even cast it.
“Dammit,” he said, and abruptly stood.
“What do you want me to do?” Love asked.
“Document every inch of that cave. Find me a clue as to where he might have gone.”
“What about Sokolov and Donovan?” Avila asked.
Barnett turned and stared directly into her dark eyes.
“If they’re not already dead, I have no doubt they wish they were.”
He hustled from the command center and made his way to the main building with Avila trailing in his wake.
“Get me a head count. I want everyone not physically inside this base here within the hour, regardless of their location, and I want them reporting in every fifteen minutes until they arrive.”
“Should we raise the readiness level?”
“Initiate Emergency Protocol Delta.”
“Yes, sir.”
She hesitated and fell a step behind. He whirled to face her.
“You have your orders, Agent Avila.”
The cracks in her ordinarily impervious façade betrayed her fear.
“What do you think is out there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I have a feeling it’s only a matter of time before we find out.”
He left her to her task and made his way through the chaos. The entire station had practiced for this eventuality, while hoping to never have to do it for real. In a matter of minutes, he would have all non-combat personnel inside the mess hall, which could be isolated from the rest of the buildings by closing off the connecting corridors. Below it was a heated recess large enough to accommodate all personnel alongside reserve generators, fuel, and enough food to last a month. He prayed they wouldn’t have to put that to the test.
Barnett had already lost four men and he still didn’t have the slightest idea what they were up against. He understood what Avila was asking, but he could tell that the animal carcasses had been down there in that den for a long time. If Richards had survived the elements, he was long gone, unlike whatever had killed Jonas and Berkeley
. That thing was still somewhere out there, and, if he was right, growing more brazen by the minute. Sokolov and Donovan were by no means pushovers, nor were they small by anyone’s definition of the word. They hadn’t surprised their killer and triggered its survival instincts, like Dr. Murphy theorized had happened to Jonas and Berekely; they’d been hunted, overwhelmed, and their bodies removed from the scene with frightening speed and efficiency. So much, in fact, that he had to wonder if there wasn’t more than one—
Roche appeared from his peripheral vision, caught him by the arm, and pinned him to the insulated wall, their faces mere inches apart.
“Tell me what’s going on right now or so help me—”
Barnett shoved Roche away from him.
“You should be in the mess hall with the others.”
“Not until you tell me what’s happening.”
“We have a situation, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss it with you.”
“It can’t get out of there, can it?”
“Zeta? It’s the least of our worries right now.”
“So there’s another one. You found Richards.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Barnett said.
He brushed past Roche and hurried to the front entrance, where members of his team converged on the main deck from all directions. He stared across the ruins in the crimson light. The shadows between the ancient structures were as fathomless as tar. Men in black fatigues with assault rifles slung over their shoulders climbed the rungs on the sides of the buildings and took up their posts on the rooftops. They wore dual-sensor night vision goggles, which fused thermal and infrared technology in such a way that body heat stood apart from the green-scale background like a bright orange beacon.
Barnett stepped back inside, armed the electromagnetic lock, and ran to the command center.
32
ROCHE
While Roche didn’t care for the way Barnett had dismissed him, he’d learned what he needed to know. Barnett no longer had everything under control. Worse, he had no more idea what was going on than Roche did.
Thumping sounds overhead. Footsteps.
Forsaken Page 18